Fifty Years on the South Bank: The National Theatre Tells Its Own Story
A free outdoor installation this October will mark half a century of one of Britain's great stages
By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
The National Theatre turns 50 this year, and it plans to mark the occasion the way it knows best: with a story, told in public, for free.
According to the BBC, the theatre will install an outdoor exhibition on London's South Bank in October, drawing on 50 tales from its history to trace the building's life since it opened in 1976. Details of the specific productions or figures to be featured were not disclosed in the announcement, so it remains to be seen which chapters of the National's history — from Peter Hall's founding tenure through decades of premieres — will make the cut.
What is clear is the choice of format. Rather than a ticketed retrospective inside its own walls, the theatre is taking the anniversary to the street, free and open to whoever walks past. For an institution that has spent fifty years arguing, implicitly, that serious theatre belongs to everyone and not just subscribers, that is a fitting way to celebrate.
The South Bank itself has changed enormously since the building's brutalist concrete first drew both admiration and scorn in the mid-1970s. An installation that lets passersby — tourists, commuters, skateboarders on the undercroft below — encounter the theatre's history without buying a ticket says something about what the National still believes its job to be.
No cast list, no ticket price, no velvet seats required. Just fifty years of stories, set loose on the riverbank in October.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know. Here, there's nothing to finish yet — just a date to circle.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
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